Jean Patrick Icart-Pierre
Icart-Pierre subverts our understanding of the proliferated commonplace ideas and imagery of popular culture through an artistic practice that critiques contemporary society. Intersecting painting, drawing, and sculpture, he exposes the social and political turmoil of our time from the black perspective. Repurposing hoodies and backpacks, inscribing them with cutting commentary, and depicting the overlooked elements of daily life through the strokes of his brush. Icart-Pierre encourages us to reexamine our own preconceived notions of engaging with consumer culture as well as one another.
To create these works, he combines traditional materials, such as oils and acrylics, with everyday objects, including hoodies and backpacks. His paintings intermingle abstraction and figuration to create soft yet gestural works that embody compelling narratives of the black experience. This builds in his sculptural work. Here, he takes from the masters of modern and contemporary art; Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, Claes Oldenburg, Georg Baselitz, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Marcel Duchamp. Like his predecessors, he reinscribes meaning into ordinary objects, elevating them to the level of art through his disruption of their context. Pushing beyond the realm of ready mades and soft sculptures, he does more than alter the function of the objects, he intensifies his messages through his incorporation of painted elements and the use of text.
A running thread throughout his practice, whether two or three dimensional, is the appropriation of imagery from music, fashion, and commercial products. His work transforms these elements into criticism of contemporary black consumer culture. Allusions to notorious brands and the incoporation of well-known song lyrics are just a few of the methods he engages. In doing so, he allows each piece to transcend art forms, creating new connections for his viewers. A single work can become a series, investigating a singular theme or issue from new perspectives, revealing new complexities, and unearthing hidden facets.
Beyond the contemporary implications his work illuminates, they become discussions of the legacy of the challenges and turmoil faced by the African American or Black cultural identity, an identity that has become consumerized. An aesthetic that melds the contemporary and urban emerges from the physical layers of materials, mirroring the compounding of suffering endured within Black communities. His signature use of hoodies, a symbol of street style embraced by teens around the globe, now doubles as a symbol for racial profiling, social justice, and the inherent fear of unwarranted violence. Icart-Pierre's reimaginations of the hoodies as art forms proclaims the question, who can wear this ubiwuitous piece of American Fashion without facing the challenges of potentially lethal repercussions it has come to represent?
The work of Icart-Pierre forces us to reconsider our understandings of both art and life. As each work blends and pushes against definitions of medium, we ask ourselves what does it mean to be a painting or sculpture? In a deconstruction of the visual elements, we begin to excavate layer after layer of meaning. The visual and conceptual dynamism of his work captures our attention, keeping us enthralled in his disections of our contemporary cultural complacency.
By Shannon Parmenter
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" His signature use of hoodies, a symbol of street style embraced by teens around the globe, now doubles as a symbol for racial profiling, social justice, and the inherent fear of unwarranted violence."
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